London 2012 Olympics, Day 8: nothing can ever beat Super Saturday

It was, said the ringmaster himself, the “greatest day of sport I have ever
witnessed.” Around the land, the thoughts of Lord Coe were being shared by
incredulous millions. ‘Super Saturday’ hardly did it justice. Surreal?
Sublime? Stupendous? Nope, try again.

Saturday night fever: Mo Farah of Great Britain celebrates as he crosses the finish line to win gold ahead at the London 2012 Olympic GamesPhoto: GETTY IMAGES

“You see, I dreamed that we would have a night like this but not in my wildest dreams did I think it would actually unfold in the way that it did,” explained Coe.

Because it was not just that the annexing of six gold medals and one silver made this Britain’s most successful day in 104 years of Olympic competition but also that it all built so beautifully; from the morning glory of Dorney Lake, through another golden afternoon in the velodrome, into a deafening crescendo of athletics ecstasy in the Olympic Stadium itself.

In Sydney’s Olympic Stadium in 2000, I felt privileged to see perhaps the finest night of athletics competition in the annals of the Games, what with Cathy Freeman’s 400 metres triumph, Michael Johnson’s one-lap demonstration, Jonathan Edwards triple jump gold and the greatest 10,000m championship finish in history, with Haile Gebrselassie pipping Paul Tergat. It seemed unimaginable that there could be a more exhilarating evening of Olympic sport than that.

Yet on Saturday, Aug 4, 2012, the unimaginable really did unfold when Jessica Ennis, Greg Rutherford and Mo Farah all struck gold for the host nation in the Games’ premier sport on the same evening in the space of 44 unfathomable minutes.

It made Coe think back to that night in Sydney too. Every Games demands its defining home country fairytale, just as Freeman wrote Australia’s. Yet three in an hour?

It was too greedy to even dream of such a feat, he felt. Even Steve Waugh, a great of Australian sport watching amid 80,000 enraptured souls, conceded that this could not be topped.

Yet when Coe had appeared on breakfast television on the Saturday morning, musing cautiously about Team GB’s prospects for the day, he had not wanted to push his luck.

Yes, it was a day with 25 gold medals up for grabs, but as far as predictions went, he was content simply to suggest “we hope this will be a strong day for Team GB”.

It needed to be. Three golds on the Friday had begun to build the team’s momentum and the middle Saturday, as so often in recent Games, always looked to be a defining day for the hosts.

Charles van Commenee, the UK athletics performance director, admitted to feeling some nerves himself. “Because for two years I had known the timetable and I knew this day had the potential to make or break our Games,” he reflected.

Much would depend, he knew, on the slight but “unbreakable” Ennis, a veritable banker for gold after her dazzling first day of the heptathlon. Yet she had suffered a “terrible night”, her mind buzzing about the thought that something might go wrong on her biggest day, when what she really needed was untroubled sleep.

It did not help that the long jump was first up. “I was really worried about it because it hadn’t been going well,” she reflected, while her coach Toni Minichiello, as before every event, just offered the cheery reassurance: “Look, there are 80,000 friends out there. And they’re all expecting an invite to your wedding!”

The first jump was awful and Ennis’s face was lined with concern. On the second she soared out to near her best, with a 6.40m leap. So by 11am, the first moment of alarm was over. We had lift-off.

The relieved cheer could have been heard at Eton Dorney as the final day of the rowing regatta inspired its own fevered excitement too. It has perhaps been overlooked amid all the fuss about the 44-minute treble at the athletics that, before lunch that day, our oarsmen and women almost emulated the feat of triple gold in just 52 minutes.

First, there was the latest awesome foursome’s “masterpiece”, delivered to order by the favourites, Andrew Triggs Hodge, Tom James, Pete Reed and Alex Gregory. Within 20 minutes, though, Katherine Copeland and Sophie Hosking had taken the lightweight double sculls gold and the startled look on

21-year-old Copeland’s face told an authentic and wholly delightful tale of the unexpected. “We’re going to be on a stamp!” said Kat, grabbing her pal.

Then came the tough bit. Zac Purchase and Mark Hunter led for practically from the start as they sought to defend their lightweight double sculls crown, only to be overhauled in the final metres.

Their misery was too much to bear as heads hit hands and tears flowed. And not just Zac’s. After interviewing the crestfallen pair, the BBC’s John Inverdale, eyes moist, could only splutter: “Emotions, goodness me ... It’s quite hard being here as well.”

Sir Steve Redgrave, who like some kindly headmaster had ushered the boys away to the medal ceremony, was shocked to see how Inverdale, normally the most professional of operators, had been affected.

“John’s someone I have been working with for six years,” he said. “He’s very professional and quite light-hearted in the way he views sport. You don’t tend to see emotion from him but he was in floods that day. It was quite shocking.

“But it just goes to show the emotional power and how affecting these Olympics were. It also shows how far British sport has come because not so long ago, that silver medal would have been cause for huge celebrations. That is how standards have shifted: now it’s gold or nothing in the eyes of many athletes, and you need that.”

For the rest of the day, it is exactly what we got. After Ennis had finally put to bed any question that she would not strike gold by hurling the javelin further than ever before, attention switched to the velodrome as the utterly dominant trio of Dani King, Joanna Rowsell and Laura Trott smashed the world record twice in two hours – and for a third time in two days – in the team pursuit.

Trott could not help laughing incredulously at how Sir Paul McCartney had led a sing song at their medal ceremony. Things couldn’t get much more surreal, surely?

Yet as thousands en route to the Olympic Stadium latched on to the news of the cyclists, Van Commenee felt something he had never experienced in a lifetime of major championship experience. “It was the sensation that a whole nation was living the moment, both inside and outside the stadium, and it felt incredibly emotional,” he recalled.

This was Britain’s stage all right. Even the biggest international stars of the Games knew their place, with Usain Bolt restricted to a cameo with a leisurely stroll in the 100m heats and even Michael Phelps’s golden farewell in the Aquatics Centre, as he landed his 18th gold and 22nd medal of all in the 4 x 100m medley relay, resembling a sideshow. Yes, even the most successful Olympian of all was about to be upstaged.

Rutherford, even though he was the world’s in-form long jumper, felt happy that all the attention was focused on Ennis and Farah as he honed his own concentration levels by listening to a remix of The Streets’ single Blinded By The Lights on his headphones.

“The crowd were so incredible that on my first attempt, I felt they were physically lifting me off the floor and I ended up checking my stride pattern which made me run through,” said Rutherford.

Concentration restored, his second round jump of 8.21m shot him into the lead but attention at that point was still somehow deflected from him by the fevered anticipation of Ennis effectively having the luxury of two leisurely laps of honour in the 800m to seal her own victory.

Not that she saw it that way, of course. She had hung around in a near empty stadium for hours after the javelin, feeling she was less likely to be disturbed waiting for the evening session than if she went back to the Village with everyone wanting to prematurely hail her as champion.

“It was quite hard because after the javelin I was really overwhelmed and felt really teary already but at the same time I didn’t want to get too carried away because I was thinking, ‘What if I get tripped up in the 800 or something happens and I’m not able to get around?’”

The only way, she knew, was to go out and finish off the demolition job in a blaze of glory, to make all those nightmare 800m training sessions, the thing she hates most in athletics, worth all the pain. She did just that; she crushed the field at the end just as she had in her opening event, the 100m hurdles, the previous day, another pulverising demonstration of why, pound for pound, she could just be the most talented all-round athlete British athletics has ever embraced.

Van Commenee applauded, feeling this was the greatest of all the British performances in London. “What made her performance extra special for me was that, more than anybody else, people expected her to win, she was the face of the Games and, effectively, she could only lose,” he reasoned. “She was in an event where you have the chance to mess up seven times and yet still she never faltered. Amazing grace under pressure. Absolutely immense.”

Minichiello agreed. The coach – a native of Sheffield, like his protegee – has worked with Ennis for 15 years and believes her competitive instincts were already sharply honed when she was a teenager.

“I have seen other athletes of comparable physical ability to Jess but I don’t think I have ever seen anyone quite so fiercely competitive and unrelenting in their determination,” he said.

“It is a character trait I first noticed in her about eight or nine years ago when we joined a group of athletes and coaches for a game of cards the night before an athletics meeting in Italy. It was just a bit of fun but Jess ended up losing and she absolutely hated it.

“Even when it comes to the smallest things, like throwing stuff in a bin from five yards away, she has still got to win. That’s just her, and that’s why she is now an Olympic champion.”

As the crowd was still saluting its celebrating heroine, Rutherford still seemed to be floating beneath the radar as he stretched his lead in the fourth round to 8.31m. Yet still he told himself, “I’ve not done enough to win”, not surprising given that no Olympic title for 40 years had been won with so short a distance.

By now, it was Farah’s turn to take centre stage. The enveloping madness in the stadium, with Rutherford on the verge of gold number five, was unnerving but he still found time for a quick word of congratulations to Ennis as he entered the arena.

“I’d seen Jess carrying the flag as I was doing a few strides and had this feeling ‘Yeah, I want to win a gold too’,” he recalled. “People were just shouting out my name and this was even before my race had started. I was like, ‘wow!’”

As the 10,000 metres was unfolding, Rutherford watched with relief as, one by one, his challengers in the last round failed to match his mark. Yet Coe noted something remarkable and warming about the crowd’s reaction. “Yes, they were partisan but they cheered every jumper as they went down the runway.” It felt like the best of British did not need to only hail the best of British.

But then it was over, and Rutherford was Britain’s first Olympic long jump champion since Lynn Davies. Not that there was time or space for a full lap of honour: now it was Mo’s turn.

Suddenly, the atmosphere was tense again, not least in the seat occupied by Farah’s manager Ricky Simms, who had seven of his athletes running in that final, including the silver medallist Galen Rupp. This was serious, hard-headed business for Simms yet he insists that, emotionally, he had just one wish. “It had to be Mo for me,” he said. “He had lived in my house for years, we had worked together for over a decade – he was like a little brother to me. We also knew that it was his race to lose so, though there was elation there was also a sense of relief for him when he delivered.”

And delivered with almost the perfect race, too. Farah was a weird mixture that night; pumped up as if he had “just drunk 10 cups of coffee” yet at the same time, almost preternaturally relaxed, as the Ethiopian and Kenyan athletes worked together to continually test and jolt the favourite out of his rhythm. Nothing fazed him; Rupp, his only real ally, was still flabbergasted in mid-race when, as he began to feel a bit spooked by the opposition’s tactics, Farah found time amid the mayhem to coolly tap him on the shoulder and say: “Relax mate, we can do this.”

Farah was a reflection of their trackside mentor, coach Alberto Salazar, who seemed to be the calmest man in the stadium, so sure was he of his race plan and their ability to execute it.

“It was very simple,” said Salazar. “Don’t try to win until the last 400, perhaps the last 200. Fast or slow, I told Mo and Galen: ‘You guys can outsprint anybody in this race.’”

They did just that, leaving Salazar, one of the sport’s greatest marathon men, exulting that the moment was “greater than anything I did in my own athletic career, better than getting married or having my kids! And what really touched me was how Mo looked around and didn’t truly celebrate until he learned Galen had come second. That’s a measure of the man.”

To confirm Salazar’s reputation as a bit of a wizard, Simms still could not credit how he managed to disappear and then reappear so soon after the race clutching two celebratory pints of beer in what must be a new British record.

Now the party could really begin. Bowie’s Heroes, the perfect soundtrack to a night of wonders, blared out once again as Farah hugged his heavily pregnant wife Tania and daughter Rihanna, the seven year-old who had a flustered security man flapping when she zoomed across the track to hug her daddy.

Farah’s own face as he had crossed that line, a picture of gaping-mouthed, saucer-eyed wonder, seemed to reflect the nation’s exultation. Just as his words in the post-race press conference made you realise why this had not just been a great night for British sport, but perhaps simply for Britain itself.

For when he was asked if a part of him wished he had been representing his birthplace of Somalia, Farah took the clumsy question and smashed it, without any malice or side, for the biggest six of the Games. “Look, mate, this is my country,” he proclaimed. “This is where I grew up, this is where I started my life ... And when I put on my Great Britain vest, I’m proud.”

You just wanted to salute him for that declaration. If Ennis had been the serene face of a home Games, Mo now stood as the shining symbol of its unifying force.

Or, as the most marvellous tweet of the Games put it that night: “A Muslim, a mixed-race lass & a ginger bloke walk into a bar. And everyone gets them a drink.” Take a bow @Scriblit of Canterbury.

It was quite deliriously mad, as Games volunteers ended up embracing complete strangers while they made their dizzy way home from the Olympic Park. How do you come down from a high like that?

“When I finally went to bed in the early hours, I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, my eyes wide open and my heart racing. I was desperately trying to get to sleep but just couldn’t switch off,” said Rutherford.

“So after three hours of staring, I admitted defeat, got up and had a walk round the village on my own at 5.30 in the morning, just thinking and watching all the Russians coming in, all of them incredibly drunk.”

Not as drunk as we all felt, surely. Mo’s protestation – “It’s never going to get any better than this!” - could stand as the motion picture strapline one day. As it turned out, a week later Farah may have been tempted to feel he got that bit wrong after his epic 5,000m win.

But frankly, ‘Super Saturday: The Sequel’ was never going to match the original.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“I can’t believe this is real ... that we just won ... We just won the Olympics.”A dazed Katherine Copeland comes to terms with her gold medal in the lightweight double sculls in a TV interview